Digital retail lending may hit $1 trillion in five years; digital disbursements witness five-fold rise, reveals report

Mumbai: Digital retail lending in the country could reach $1 trillion over the next five years, with annual digital disbursements witnessing a five-fold increase, said a report. Digital retail lending has seen explosive growth both globally and in the country, a report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) said today, adding while the juggernaut was led by fintech, traditional lenders have now joined the fray. It said technological advancements will transform the face of front-end consumer experience, as well as enable full-scale digitization of operations. Fueled by these shifts, BCG expects lending firms to witness a dramatic shift in power bases. “A confluence of these factors could drive over $1 trillion being disbursed digitally in the coming five years with annual digital disbursements increasing fivefold from current levels,” the report said. [caption id=“attachment_4379095” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representative image. Reuters[/caption] BCG India senior partner and director Alpesh Shah said Jan Dhan Yojana and the India stack have made end-to-end digital lending a reality. “The country has leapfrogged many advanced economies by setting up open architecture layers such as Aadhaar, UPI, Bharat Bill Payment Systems; and systems such as GSTN, TReDS and GeM which will go a long way in boosting digital and data-enabled lending,” he added. According to Shah, nearly 50 percent of loan seekers with Internet access applied for or purchased a loan digitally over the last 12 months, showing that consumers across loan types are now digitally ready. Prateek Roongta, partner and director, BCG India, said, “Interestingly, digital loan ticket sizes are comparable to physical loans.” Consumers typically search for price and eligibility, with search engines and lender sites seen as the most influential in the loan purchase decision, according to the report.